Amusements of Others

Two Ariels.

One a man and the other one will always be a girl.

Both had jet black hair. That black that almost looks blue. One had curls that she would spend hours in front of the mirror every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday burning down so her hair hung limp, flaccid and straight. The other also had curly hair, but you'd never know it for he buzzed his short and kept it hidden under a baseball cap.

Both drank hard and both had that telltale, pink tint around the edges of their eyes.

Notes From The South

I never used to change a single guitar string on its own. Like, if one broke I'd buy a new set of six strings and start afresh. I don't do that anymore.

I guess consistency of sound doesn't mean to me the same thing it once did.

There is a concrete walkway by the river, lined with dried out rosemary bushes and collapsed wooden pylons. The pylons stick out of the edges of the river-bed, scattered and pointing up and out in all different directions. Blackened by decades of rising and falling water levels, some are rounded at their end-points and others are shattered and jagged.

They all look like they fell there so perfectly - it all seems so well timed.

What It Was

Kellie died while I was away. I was in Denver, meeting with a potential client and I only found out after I got back. It was sudden and it was shocking. She was coming back from dinner and her date's car slammed sideways into a pylon out the front of a gas station. The date walked away with only a few scratches and Kellie died instantly.

No one got to say goodbye. No one expected they would ever have to.

Kellie was a barista at the little bicycle shop just east of downtown Austin.  A flat roofed, low-slung, single story, rectangle building. Almost like a garage. A brick wall runs two thirds of the way from the back, splitting the building in half length-ways. E-bikes, raised repair benches and racing posters fill up the right side and a coffee bean roaster, pine-coloured communal tables and a cafe counter fill up the left.

The grey and brown interior of iron and concrete is separated from the picnic tables outside on the sidewalk by ceiling-height, glass windows. The owner's uncle had built those picnic tables when they first opened to act as a barrier between shop-front and the gas station next door. The very same gas station of Kellie's horrific end.

Out of Range

"I used to care, but things have changed."

That's a Dylan lyric. It's from a song he wrote for a movie and it's the most liberating shit I've ever heard. 

I mean - yes, it's true that we all get the choice to lay some of our burdens on down. That isn't especially unique. But that isn't what he is saying. He isn't saying he is the one who has changed. He isn't saying that he has let go of caring about you and now he feels lighter and freer and changed.

He sings "things" have changed. Stuff outside of him. Like a new bank account; or a broken-down bike; or a better option; or stronger boundaries; or a global fucking pandemic; or a filled up notebook; or a different diet; or maybe even the weather or something like that.

Other shit has changed. And those changes - those that happen around us and to us - are enough to make you no longer care. He is saying that you all gotta do is hang around long enough and things will change and your caring will go away.